I tend to see differences in individuals, but I’m sure age is a mitigating factor. Here are some general categories of people:
[ol]
[li]Technophobes: Know one (or half or zero) ways to do something, and fear change or new technology, and will struggle if required to learn any new technology[/li][li]Technomeh: Know how to do some things they have to do, but don’t like technology for its own sake. They can learn new technology if forced to, but probably won’t on their own[/li][li]Technophile: Will learn new technology because they find it fun. They are the most adaptable to change[/li][li]Technocurmudgeon: Used to be a technophile, but stopped being interested in new technology at some point in time[/li][/ol]
I’m in academia, so I see a range of ages, from the current grad students (millennials), my cohort (generation X), and older faculty (baby boomers). The millennials haven’t been around long enough for there to be any technocurmudgeons, but otherwise, I see all categories in all age groups. I think younger people show fewer technophobes. I find as people get older they tend to move from the technophile to the technocurmudgeon group.
For my mother, TV was a new thing in her life. For me, much of the digital technology started into my adulthood. For me, I feel that I’m up on what’s happening in the digital world. But I never personally grabbed onto gaming because I was a working adult when it started to grow.
I would suggest to the Gen X crowd that there will be some new technologies that come along that will push them into the “old and don’t quite understand” category.
The same pattern repeats with each new generation.
What will that be? Robotics? Virtual Reality? Cyborg-ing? All three combined with big data?
True, and I should mention that pointing out similarities usually only works on one or a couple different axes. This is why it’s so dumb to pretend there’s no progress, to take as dogma that there’s nothing new under the Sun. That old chestnut must be taken as dogma, because otherwise it’s an obvious loser!
Maybe it worked better in the Bronze Age. Who knows?
I remember watching the Paranoia Films of the 1970s on TCM. One of the biggest markers of the era was Them, the vast conspiracy against everything right and good in the world, which, of course, all media with a distribution was in on. A few zines might slip through, but if you’re Robert Redford, The Washington Post would call the FBI soon as look at you if you brought them evidence the President was involved in chicanery. No, They controlled the horizontal, the vertical, and the popular perception of Vietnam.
(They also had a hit out on sarcasm.)
Now we see what happens when there is a serious demographic shift (More black and brown people! Ketchup loses to salsa! There are laws against smearing queers!) and mass media They don’t control: We find out there never was a They to begin with, only something which used to be called the Liberal Consensus, that even mainstream news (FOX News, because I’m not going to pretend Both Sides Do It) will pander to outright addle-brained paranoia if it makes a profit, and that keeping up the profitable illusion that They exist is profitable precisely because paranoia is the enemy of skepticism. The business model of something like Brietbart or Infowars is to get the audience in a mindset where all other sources are rejected, consensus reality is evidence of a conspiracy against their small and beleaguered group, and, therefore, only that one source is credible.
The reactionaries of previous generations had places to complain about social change. The Klan and the Conservative Citizens’ Councils certainly existed. They also had less to complain about, in real terms, and more of the mainstream was on their side. That has to be taken into consideration as well.
I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily a matter of “not quite understanding” as it is maybe not as relevant or necessary for us.
Take Tinder, for example. I’m sure there are plenty of single Gen Xers who use it, but as much of my generation is married with kids by now, it’s not as much a part of our culture as it might be for people who discovered it in college and their 20s.
As a member of Gen X, my dating experience mostly consisted of going to bars and clubs with my friends and striking up conversations with girls. The only tech we really used was exchanging cell phone numbers.
If Tinder was available in the early to mid 90s, we certainly would have used it!
Oh, I think you can see technocurumudgeons in the under-35 population. But I think you’ll see it more in older millennials and probably not so much in college freshmen. Heck, I was skeptical about the need to ever actually buy the following (by no means an exhaustive list, just a few off the top of my head):
[ul]
[li]HDTV[/li][li]Smartphone[/li][li]Blu-Ray/HD-DVD[/li][li]Laptop[/li][li]Windows 95[/li][/ul]
Sure, I own/owned all of those things by now but while I consider myself a technophile I’ve never been a bleeding edge kind of guy. I’m probably even more curmudgeonly about the big “social disruptors” that remind me of the late 90s, where everything was pitched as “<blank> but on the Internet” as a reason for being given millions in venture capital and patents on stupidly obvious things.
Let’s see: Microsoft Office peaked with Office 95 and has been downhill ever since, Windows peaked at Windows 7, Apple hasn’t made a decent laptop since 2012, and 4K TV is still a gimmick.
That is a good point. What a lot of “youngs” don’t understand about “olds” not adopting (or understanding) technology is that the next new thing just doesn’t have discernible utility for them. Why adopt something “just 'cause”? Much new digital tech is centered on digital social interaction and personal entertainment. Those are not the most compelling arenas for previous generations.
And experience has taught them that it may not be around forever (Yahoo, AOL, MySpace, (and hopefully someday Twitter)).
hardly unique to millennials. Young people always believe they’re the first people on the planet to ever have an idea.
that said, I’m firmly in Gen X and pretty comfortable w/ tech in most forms, though I recognize I’m at a point in my life were it’ll become more difficult and take longer to learn things.
what really disturbs me about the rise of social media and constant connectivity is that we’ve enabled ourselves to treat each other in horrible ways which we never would before. there’s something about being within reach of the other person’s fists that moderates behavior, and thanks to twitter and other platforms everyone is safely out of reach of any meaningful consequences. And as much as I despise teenagers, adults are no better about this.
I’m just so depressed at how so many parents just chuck an iPhone in their kids’ hands as a digital pacifier to shut them up, then whine about how their kid does nothing but sulk, poke at his phone, and roll his eyes at them.
On the other hand, I see people overly lamenting the use of digital devices and it’s often GenX people.
“I go to a restaurant and kids are just staring at their phones or tablets!”
“What did you do when you were in a restaurant and you were six?”
“We colored or brought a book or brought some small toys!”
“What do you think the kids are doing? They’re playing a game or reading or coloring or whatever”
“It’s not the same! And sometimes it’s loud and annoying”
“Know what else is annoying? Bored kids stacking up all the creamers into a tower until it topples and sends creamers all over the table and floor.”
“But it’s not how WE used to do it…”
I’ve had this basic conversation with people multiple times who are convinced that vroom-vrooming Matchbox cars around a table is pure and right but playing Toca Cars on a tablet is an abomination of childhood. And it’s almost always people in my general age bracket.
Meh, when I was 15 I would sullenly listen to music on my headphones and roll my eyes when asked to do stuff. That’s not some magical function of mobile devices, it’s called being 15.
I mean, we can debate strawmen about kids who spend literally every second on a device but that’s not my experience with most kids. Or it’s not much worse than kids who spent “every second” in the basement with an Atari or Nintendo but that’s always “different” because it’s what the Gen X’ers grew up with so that’s okay. Not like these new fangled iPods somehow making teenagers grumpy and resentful of their parents for the first time ever.
Music technology and how people listen to music is another great example of cultural changes from generation to generation. From the 70s to the mid 90s, people mostly listened to music the same way. They would hear songs on the radio or buy it at a record store. Many would create “mix tapes” of songs they liked to listen to on the go or share with their friends. The formats changed over time (LP, cassette, CD), but for all intents and purposes, the shared experience of music listening was largely the same.
MTV and VH1 came along in the 80s and introduced the concept of the music video. So that was something new.
The big change was in the mid 90s with MP3 technology and file sharing. Now people could share music at will, bring their entire collection wherever they went, and the “mix tape” was replaced by the “play list”, which was no longer constrained by the length of a cassette or CD. People mostly no longer owned large physical collections of CDs or LPs. Most no longer owned expensive high fidelity component systems with giant speakers anymore.
The big tech shift that I’m having trouble adapting to is “streaming”. Apple no longer makes iPods. Kids no longer want to own giant databases of files (let alone physical media). It’s all streaming services like Spotify, Pandora, iTunes, Amazon, etc. I still like having a physical music collection that doesn’t need to be connected to “the cloud” where I’ve micromanaged every playlist. I also feel like the “streaming” concept has helped create music that just sounds generic because it’s all designed to be categorized into genres by algorithms. Like I was going through various “best of 2017” lists from Rolling Stone, Pitchfork and other music sites. It all sounds the same to me. Mostly nothing I’d want to own. Just stuff I’d select as part of a “channel” to play in the background.
